It’s fine to hold nuclear talks with Tehran. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that Iran has changed its ways.
Photo by Maysam Dehghani/AFP/Getty Images
In Geneva this week, an Iranian delegation has been holding talks
with six other nations about its country's nuclear program. These
negotiations—the first to take place under the auspices of Iran's new
president, Hassan Rouhani—inspired little bursts of positive rhetoric.
The BBC reported an "upbeat mood" in Geneva. A European diplomat spoke
of "cautious optimism." Rouhani himself had pledged to "resolve" the
nuclear problem within the next six months.
After years of no progress with Iran, why the sudden good cheer? It's
certainly not because Rouhani represents a radical new strand of
Iranian thinking about nuclear power. After all, he was Iran's nuclear
negotiator from 2003 to 2005. Parts of the nuclear program were
temporarily suspended during that time, but it was never eliminated.
Nor does Rouhani's new Cabinet mark a profound break from those who
have run the Islamic Republic since its inception. As his justice
minister, Rouhani has appointed Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a former high official in the Ministry of Information in the bloody and violent 1980s. Among other things, Pourmohammadi was one of those primarily responsible for the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.
He moved on to the ministry's foreign intelligence operations in the
1990s, when its "achievements" included the bombing of a Jewish
community center in Buenos Aires and the assassination of dissidents in
Iran and around the world.
No one is denying this bit of history. After appointing
Pourmohammadi, Rouhani went out of his way to praise his "numerous
experiences in the government" and his record: "He has been successful,
wherever he has been." Little appears to have changed: In the week of
Sept. 23, when Rouhani was at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, more than 30 Iranians were reportedly executed without due process of law.
Rouhani's team, in other words, has not gone to Geneva after a
process of profound internal transformation. On the contrary, Iran has
returned to negotiations for only one reason: The new president wants
economic sanctions lifted because they have taken a powerful toll on the
Iranian economy. At a recent conference in London,
I heard Iranian diaspora economists return again and again to that
theme: Sanctions have destabilized Iran's currency, oil and gas
industry, international trade, and investor confidence. Of course the
shortcomings of sanctions are well-known: They are a blunt and
inefficient instrument; plenty of people defy them; and illicit trade
goes on all the time. And, yes, they distribute economic pain over the
entire population and don't necessarily hit hardest the people who make
the decisions. Nevertheless, three decades' worth of overlapping unilateral and multilateral sanctions
on Iran, organized at different times by the United States, the United
Nations, and the European Union, are, at least in a narrow sense,
"working": They have forced Iran's leaders back to a negotiating table
they had largely abandoned some years ago.
The sanctions' success has also persuaded the Iranians to try a
tactic that has worked well for many other countries, including Russia:
Persuade the West to keep its foreign policy concerns in
silos—separating economics, human rights, and nuclear weapons, as though
they have nothing to do with one another. Iran's oil ministry has even
launched a kind of outreach campaign, declaring that "Iran welcomes any oil cooperation,
even with American companies." Presumably the Iranians believe that
those U.S. oil companies would lobby the Obama administration, hard, to
lift sanctions altogether.
Such lobbying would be extremely short-sighted. If Iran is able to
make concrete, verifiable nuclear proposals, some changes could of
course be made to the sanctions regime. Some have suggested
unfreezing Iranian assets held abroad as an option. But while
negotiations continue, let's be clear about why the world cares about
Iran's nuclear program in the first place.
Certainly we in the United States aren't overly worried about
Britain's nuclear arsenal or about India's. The United States is hardly
in a position to oppose nuclear weapons in principle, since we and
several of our allies have them. No, we oppose Iran's nuclear ambitions
for one reason: because we object to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a
quasi-totalitarian state that since 1979 has been led by brutal,
volatile men with no respect for the rule of law. Their regime is a
"domestic" problem for many Iranians, and it's a major problem for
Iran's neighbors and the rest of the world.
To put it differently: As long as men like Pourmohammadi are still
running Iran's courts and prisons, as long as the Iranian judicial
system is subverted by a politicized version of Shariah, there will
always be a limit to what can be achieved through any conversations with
Tehran. Talking is fine. But the negotiators in Geneva should leave any
optimism at the door.
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